Abstract
Global software development (GSD) practice has been increasingly emerging in the recent few decades in the field of business and software industry. On the one hand, many software development organizations get the benefits of GSD, including but not limited to reduced cost, cheap labor, round the clock working and skilled professionals. On the other hand, these organizations have to face several challenges because of GSD. These challenges pose serious threats to the stability of the GSD projects. Communication between distributed team members is one of the most crucial challenges in GSD. Therefore, the current study aims to identify the communication risk in GSD and also evaluate the impact of these communication risks in GSD environment. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) has been performed to identify all the communication-related issues in GSD. After that, a conceptual framework has been proposed for evaluating the impact of those issues on communication risk in GSD. An empirical evaluation has been performed on data collected from the software organizations of Pakistan working in GSD based environment. The finding of our study demonstrates that geographical distance, socio- temporal distance, socio-culture distance, team member's attitude, team issues, organizational & architectural issue and customer issue have a significant direct impact on communication risk in GSD. The study also shows that there is a significant correlation between findings of SLR and empirical investigation (r = 0.460, P = 0.005). Further, we believe that the results of our research can help to tackle the issues related to communication in GSD. Therefore, it will help to improve the performance of the development activities of GSD organizations.
Highlights
Global Software Development is defined as a discipline in which software engineering activities are performed in an environment where the teams are distributed through geographical boundaries [1]
The novelty of proposed conceptual framework is that we have presented and highlighted few other communication issues such as team issues, technical issues customer issues etc. which have not been investigated and incorporated in existing frameworks [21], [28] In the end, empirical investigation of the proposed conceptual framework has been carried out from the software organizations of Pakistan that are working in Global software development (GSD) environment to analyze the impact of these issues, to minimize the communication-related risks faced by the globally distributed teams in a distributed environment
The rapid increase in communication risk in GSD motivated us to identify communication issues that are strongly affecting the communication process among the distributed team members working in a distributed environment
Summary
Global Software Development is defined as a discipline in which software engineering activities are performed in an environment where the teams are distributed through geographical boundaries [1]. It is be characterized as distributed software development [2]. A growing number of organizations have been acquiring software which is developed in an environment where most of the employees are dispersed over the temporal, cultural and geographical boundaries [4]. Less development cost [7] have influenced many organizations to acquire the benefits of the GSD. GSD has become a usual procedure in organizations of the software industry
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